Smithsonian boosts network, tools to meet increasing digital demands

Deron Burba, CIO, Smithsonian Institution

The Smithsonian Institution wants to change the way the public accesses the more
than 400 terabytes of data in its collection.

To do that, the Smithsonian must continually improve how it stores, manages and
presents its huge library of information.

Deron Burba, the Smithsonian's chief information officer, said one approach is to
use new 3-D technology to let researchers and others manipulate digital images
like never before. They will be able to zoom in, change lighting and details and
interact with the object in a way that could only be done in person.

Burba said the Smithsonian will roll out the 3-D technology later this fall.

"It's something that is core to what we are doing here in trying to make our
collections' objects more accessible to the world," Burba said. "There is just so
much that we have in the 137 million items that has value to the world, and
anything we can do to use technology to make it more available to them is really
our focus in creating a digital Smithsonian."

Of course, for the 3-D technology to work, the Smithsonian needs to upgrade other
pieces of its technology infrastructure first.

Burba said the agency almost has completed its network upgrade to include
providing easier access to Internet2 — a high-speed nationwide network used
mostly by researchers and educational institutions to share information.

"Having the bandwidth that you couldn't get from a commercial Internet service
provider gives us a platform that enables us to do things that wouldn't be
possible without that capability," he said. "That includes working with
partnerships with research centers, including transferring very large research
data sets for things like genomics to large 3-D datasets that will allow schools
to be able to have those datasets, to be able to explore themselves, to be able to
produce print outs of things that we have in our collection for their own use.

It's really an enabling platform for many different things, and it ties us even
more tightly in with the education community and research community, which is very important to us and our mission."

Burba said Internet2 is only for a certain set of Smithsonian employees. Others
are connected via a wide-area network that stretches across the U.S. and
internationally.

The network upgrades also will help the Smithsonian start offering WiFi at
museums. Burba said the organization is in the middle of a pilot at the National
Air and Space Museum in Washington and in Chantilly, Va.

"We are very interested in providing WiFi, particularly as more and more people
bring mobile devices with them into our museums, and finding ways that we can
leverage that WiFi to enhance their experience during their visit," he said.
"We're looking at ways that we can provide much more content and information to be
able to enhance the visitors' experience. There's just so many objects and so
little opportunity for us to provide all the information someone may want to
explore as part of their experience in seeing something that we have in our
collections."

Burba said outfitting WiFi for 6,000 to 7,000 people at any one time comes with a
host of challenges starting with the size and construction of the buildings.

For example, the Air and Space Museums are akin to airplane hangars, while the
National History Museum is about 100 years old and built with thick layers of
concrete and other material that WiFi signals don't travel through well.

"The other thing with it in terms of being a pilot is exploring the ability to
leverage things like location services, which is particularly challenging since
the various mobile providers or platforms aren't converging on a single standard,"
Burba said. "We are exploring how we can do things that would have mobile apps or
websites that could take advantage of location to help people and make that
experience just more dynamic, and get information about what they are seeing and
where they are."

The Smithsonian developed an architecture to support its digital asset management
system, and is constantly expanding the types of and amount of data.

Burba said the digital asset management system has more than 4 million assets,
including 250,000 which the Smithsonian added in August.

The Enterprise Digital Asset Management System brings all of this information
together through Web services platform called the Enterprise Digital Asset Network
(EDAN).
EDAN connects 30 disparate databases and lets the user more easily search through
the entire
collections.

"The EDAN system is very important to our digital priorities here. It will
continue to expand, and we will look to build new capabilities that leverage that
information, making it easier for people to find things at the Smithsonian," Burba
said. "But also being able to do things like our transcription service that is now
part of our digital volunteer platform, being able to take the data that we now
have aggregated through both our Enterprise Digital Asset Management System and
EDAN and build applications that help us solve our problems, as well as make our
information more accessible to the public."